Modern mountain bikes are engineering marvels. Frame and component materials, geometry, and wheels have made monumental advances in the last 25 years. You wouldn’t ride a bike without a dropper post today, but we all did for many years and didn’t question it until the benefits were obvious. The same is true with your suspension setup.

The industry has greatly advanced suspension and frame kinematics. Now the challenge is to develop the bike to fit you and your riding style. An ever increasing number of suspension settings has led to bikes with billions of permutations. How can you correlate what you feel to a proposed suspension setting without guessing? And if you make the wrong change, could you get back to where you were? How do you quantify one setting over the other? Feel?

We have determined, through years of data acquisition and analysis, that it’s impossible to tune a bike without data as feedback. The human brain is a valuable sensor, but it’s no substitute for hard data. Data logging is only the first step, you also need data analysis that is powerful and intuitive. Data has gravity, the more you collect, the heavier it weighs. So being able to sift through this data intelligently is also of great importance.

Demystify your bike

We believe suspension tuning is a never-ending process. The status quo is fraught with error and bias. But don’t take our word for it, listen to the world-class riders we’ve worked with. As you develop your bike, you get faster, which then puts stress back onto your tune. Temperature, terrain, and even altitude can affect your suspension. Your suspension tune must evolve with you. Without data, you are in a desert without a compass.

With a comprehensive view of your bike suspension, you will quickly forget about settings. You’ll realize that with your data analysis, you can make the modifications needed to get the desired outcome, without guessing. You’ll have more confidence in your decisions because you are using hard facts, not opinions or gut feel. If you decide you need a suspension upgrade, or a tuning revalve, you can confidently state what your goals are and back this up with hard data.

Motion Instruments started as a data acquisition project. It quickly morphed into a data analysis project which led us to tackle data management at scale.

Be the first to try

If you're interested in being the first in line with our product, send us a note: pre-order@motioninstruments.com. Be sure to let us know what bike you're riding (Year, Make, Model). The first 500 bikes will get a discount.